NAACP Documents 1,100+ Black Americans Lynched 1900-1919

The NAACP's painstaking documentation, drawing on newspaper reports and local records, identified over 1,100 documented lynchings of Black Americans between 1900 and 1919 — an average of more than one per week, every week, for twenty years. Mississippi led with the most lynchings, followed by Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. Many lynchings went undocumented. The NAACP hung a banner from its New York office reading 'A Man Was Lynched Yesterday' each time a lynching was reported. The consistency and scale constituted a systematic campaign of racial terror, not isolated criminal incidents.